Creating a game with Unreal Engine 4 Without knowing anything about it

08 October 2014

Github just started giving out “Student packs”, which include quite a big list of gifts, including a 1 year license of Unreal Engine. I decided to use that to create a game and learn about game development all together.

Unreal Engine Browser

##Step 1

At first I decided to take a look at sample games, to get an idea of the project structure. It comes with a bootstrap for most types of games, so I started with an FPS one.

Once open you see the actual game being rendered live on the editor. On the left you have some Modes and all the Content in your game.

On top the usual Save, Settings… Alongside with Play, which actually turns the live render in the middle into a playable game.

And finally in the right we have the 3D scene elements and the Details of the selected object. I didn’t really know where to start doing anything, so I changed some settings, moved things around, edited the map…

Unreal Engine Browser

With this approach you quickly realize that This is hard.

##Step 2
I normally learn that way but there simply are too many new things. So new approach:

They apparently have a lot of YouTube playlists teaching how to do virtually everything. So I’ll start there. But if I want to structure my learning I need goals.

Forget about creating a game for now, my milestone will be to create a realistic terrain generator. In order to get there I need to learn how to create a terrain first, so I have some basics now: